Industrial PhD positions - Advance Graduate Program - Fall 2025

Imagine a world where road traffic accidents are nothing but a distant memory, and vehicles seamlessly navigate the streets with the power of cutting-edge software. How would it be to make such a vision a reality? On top of that – how would you consider working alongside some of the brightest people in the industry and learn from the best? If this sounds appealing – apply today to join our visionary company and help us change the world.  

Join Our Advanced Graduate Program (AGP)

Think about contributing to the advancement of mobility and autonomy while pursuing growth in your personal and professional life. Our Advanced Graduate Program offers a unique opportunity to deepen your knowledge, contribute to meaningful innovation, and collaborate with a diverse team of fellow PhD students and leading experts across academia and industry.

As part of a dynamic cohort of around 12 industrial PhD students, you’ll explore new research frontiers in areas critical to Zenseact’s mission. You’ll also become part of our broader community where your contributions are valued, your ideas can take flight, and your future role in our product and technology teams is supported from day one.

PhD Research Assignment: The project unfolds over four years, starting the earliest on 1st January 2026 and the latest by 15th June 2026. 

We offer a permanent employment, subject to the approval of external funding applications, to be communicated mid-December 2025.

We’ve supported many industrial PhD students over the years—many of whom have moved on to key roles within the company. We’re committed to ensuring your growth continues well beyond the program while providing the perfect environment for your ideas to flourish.

What You’ll Do

• Conduct research on a strategically important topic with the goal of earning a PhD
• Work with a support network that includes a group manager, an industrial supervisor at Zenseact, an academic supervisor from a partnering university, and an academic coach.
• Take graduate-level courses, publish peer-reviewed articles, attend conferences and workshops, and complete licentiate and doctoral degrees.
• Test and refine your research using real-world automotive data and vehicles, leveraging resources from Zenseact and Volvo Cars.
• Collaborate with researchers from Swedish universities, Zenseact, and Volvo Cars—sparking innovation and shaping tomorrow’s mobility solutions, together.

Research domains/Key areas:

Help us advance technology within the following domains:  

1 - Self-supervised representation learning for autonomous driving 

• Studying how to learn self-supervised representations natively on multi-modal, high resolution data 
• Establishing self-supervised representation learning methods that are able to do sensor and temporal fusion 
• Exploring computationally tractable solutions that have the best scaling properties on large data volumes 

2 – Generative AI in Continuously Integrated Safety-Critical Software Development 

• Implementing strategies for the adoption of generative AI in safety-critical software development 
• Studying the best software development ecosystems that enables AI-driven development, offering tighter integration with LLMs and faster iteration cycles 
• Exploring how multiple AI agents can collaboratively address specific tasks within the design, development, and deployment of safety-critical software 

3 -  Multimodal Large Language Models for End-to-End Planning  

• Studying how MLLMs can effectively integrate information from different sensor modalities for safety critical automotive applications 
• Explore how to use MLLMs to generate driving plans navigation options 
• Explore how MLLMs can generalize across different environments, weather conditions, and traffic scenarios 

4 – Federated Reinforcement and Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving 

• Exploring federated architectures that enable vehicles to collaboratively learn planning policies 
• Developing hybrid reinforcement learning and imitation learning approaches that combine safety, stability and adaptability 
• Enable robust generalization through personalized or clustered federated training, addressing non-IID data from diverse environments

Who are you?

We are searching for skilled individuals committed to advancing knowledge, employing innovative research, and refining road traffic safety methods. This role calls for a diligent and passionate applicant who can see the bigger picture and is also proficient in intricate work processes. You are expected to have a sound technical and scientific approach, paired with collaborative and interpersonal abilities. 

Qualifications 

• Hold an M.Sc. or equivalent in Electrical engineering, computer science, computer vision, mathematics, or another relevant field 
• Interest in conducting research to enhance road traffic safety, pursuing the ultimate goal of eliminating road traffic losses 
• Ability to connect to your peers and establish networks and collaborations 
• Good communication skills in English, both written and verbal

Application documents

Final application date: 25th of August. Make sure to upload the following documents in your application:

• Grade transcripts from both undergraduate and graduate studies, including any international exchange programs, if applicable.  
• CV
• An electronic version of your master thesis if already available, otherwise please state the expected defense date in your application.

This role may have access to sensitive information, trade secrets, and confidential data. As part of the recruitment process, the selected candidate might undergo a background check.

More about Zenseact 

Our software makes a difference. 
Using AI-based technology to create the ultimate driver support, we’re fighting to end car accidents and make roads safe for everyone. Every year, around 1,2 million people die in traffic while approximately 50 million people get injured. Many get disabled as a result of their injury. We can do better. 

One purpose, one product. 
We’re a software company dedicated to revolutionizing car safety. By designing the complete software stack for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems, we’re fighting to end car accidents and make roads safe for everyone. Zenseact was founded by Volvo Cars, and the teams are based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Shanghai, China. When we aim for zero accidents faster, we strive to speed up the transition to safe automation. This is essentially achieved by making cars updatable – like a computer or a phone. With regular software updates, a vehicle can be made safer long after its production. By accelerating improvement loops, shortening development cycles, and deploying high-capacity software quickly, we can make cars safer, faster. 

Culture with people at heart 
To achieve our mission of saving lives and ending traffic accidents is to go where nobody has before. It requires us to venture into the unknown, pioneering new technology and pushing the frontier of autonomous driving. While there’s no denying our determination and expertise, we must stand united to succeed. By fostering a culture of support and enablement – a place of psychological safety where all of us can thrive – everything else will follow. We call this a people-at-heart culture. This culture means caring. It means the company cares about me, and we care about one another. It means sharing, so we give each other energy and have fun together. Our culture is also about belonging. It’s important to feel at home and that we can be ourselves at work. Finally, a people-at-heart culture means well-being. So, we enjoy the flexibility needed to be and do our best – at work and in life.  

Zenseact works proactively to create a culture of diversity and inclusion, where individual differences are appreciated and respected. To drive innovation we see diversity as an asset, which means we value and respect differences in gender, race, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation or age etc. 
Interviews are held on a continuous basis, so we highly recommend that you submit your application at your earliest convenience.